How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

It depends on the kind of comments. If these flags are largely unwarranted, then of course I shall discard them. If these flags are actually on-point and show rude or otherwise disrespectful behavior, then I will escalate things step-by-step. That is, first I will talk to him in the comments (and inform my co-mods so they're in the loop with this user and / or can provide other / better ideas). If this fails, the next step would be a private, direct message. If this continues to be unfruitful, then bans will happen (temporary with increasing length).

Just because somebody provides good answers doesn't mean he can just scare away / disrespect away all our other users. After all Crypto.SE is too small of a community to be able to stay at its size / grow if it allows toxic behavior.

How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

I'll give the mod a ping and ask them why they closed it. Then I will explain why it should stay open and we'll see from there. I'm confident that this will work with our mods Sushi and Codes and we'll be able to constructively find the best for the posts.

What do you think Crypto.SE's biggest challenge is? (E.g. question/answer quality/quantity, too many/few closures, too many/few questions of a certain type, bad tools/guidance, …) What do you think should be done about this (not necessarily as a moderator, it's ok if this requires the whole community or Stack Exchange staff)?

This is a hard one. I fear we may get flooded with cryptocurrency questions, now that "crypto" means "cryptocurrency" rather than "cryptography" to many people. But actually I fear our biggest challenge will be to have more academics (or rather people in general) join our site, to make it a central place for all levels of cryptographic questions. Ideally like a mix of Math.SE and Mathoverflow with lower volume.

As a mod, you will have to sometimes shield the community from so-called "toxic" behaviour. For example you may have to deal with users who are desperately in need of an answer to a heavily off-topic question, or you need to deal with a user who got very upset and resorts to inappropriate language. This can psychologically and emotionally be very exhausting and tends to require a lot of patience while kindly trying to put such users on the right track. Are you aware of this and do feel ready to serve the community as a mod nevertheless?

Given that Crypto.SE is kind of a niche site, we don't actually get those all that often, so I hope that the stress will distribute over a large enough time-frame to be easily digestable. If not, of course I will consider further appropriate actions.

Votes of moderators are definitive. If a moderators votes to close a question he doesn't need to ask anyone and none has to agree before the question is closed. With this in mind, will you change your voting activity (= vote more / less / equally often) if you'd be elected?

I feel like none of my voting patterns would actually change, as I mostly vote when I'm confident about my opinion on how to handle something. Although I fear I will be issuing more Vote-To-Deletes than right now because doing those as a normal user is kinda pointless with our low number of high-rep users.

What time zone do you live in?

UTC+1, a.k.a. Germany (which also sometimes is UTC+2).

Do you think you have any negative relationships / had any negative events with the existing mod team that may negatively impact future cooperation?

No. I have a good relation with our existing mods Sushi and Codes and in fact I already met them in person.

In your opinion, what do moderators do?

In my opinion, our mods are there to handle the obvious cases quickly because we kinda lack voting activity / users for some things to go really quickly. Additionally they are there to represent the community externally and of course to handle users who get aggressive or act otherwise inappropriately. Finally they are there to avoid any question to become a tumble-weed because of structural issues!

A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

I think I'm ready for that. Of course I probably made mistakes, but then mods shouldn't get special consideration on the content. The main thing affected will (hopefully) be the comments and while of course not every comment is a role-model on ideal behavior, I feel like most come reasonably, realistically close enough.

In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

Well, I already have >20k rep, so I will be more effective by carrying out obvious actions quicker than with my current reputation, having access to the binding mod-votes.

Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?

Because it didn't want potatoes to grow onto his eggs!